iData Technologies News Blog Feedhttp://www.idatatechnologies.com/Default.aspxTechnology blog from iData Technologies, a Cleveland Web and software developer that specializes in Content Management, search engine marketing and ethical opt-in email.en-US2/22/2018 6:38:21 AM2/22/2018 6:38:21 AMSynapse Publisher CMS60Selling versus informing5/24/2011 7:00:26 AMThere is a great series of articles on the Duct Tape Marketing blog about converting leads for folks who hate selling. There are 5 articles in the series, and in one way or another they all make the point that "selling" as it is usually thought of (a process focused solely on convincing people to buy no matter what) is not much fun and also not terribly effective, particularly for a small business.

On the other hand, selling is effective and fun when you have something of value to offer and you really try to help people by educating them about your industry and what you do. A couple of key points about this:

You have to have something that really is of value, and the process of exploring that value with prospective clients should be one that benefits them (independently of your offering) by informing them about the subject matter you work with.

The process should be one of mutual discovery, and throughout you should both be asking yourselves whether it makes sense to keep talking. If not, you should disengage in a way that leaves the door open for future cooperation.

I would argue that the same points hold true for Web content. The ideal is content that concisely explains the problem your offering solves (or the opportunity it provides) while clearly stating the features, benefits and characteristics of what you do (as well as any limitations or prerequisites). That way, the customer can decide for herself as she interacts with your site whether it makes sense to stay engaged. An additional benefit of this approach is that it's also an ideal foundation for the search marketing initiatives that you will want to undertake --- organic SEO, link building, and promoting your content through social media. http://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/I_hate_selling.aspx22150Isn’t Web site translation free?5/7/2011 7:44:15 PM

The availability of exciting new tools like Google Translate® has caused some people to wonder if there is still a requirement for professional human Web site translation. The answer is probably best given by the Google Translate team in their Wikipedia post:

Google Translate, like other automatic translation tools, has its limitations. While it can help the reader to understand the general content of a foreign language text, it does not always deliver accurate translations.

As this post suggests, Google Translate and other automated Web translation services are excellent at giving their users a general idea of what a Web pages is about, but they are not only not exact, they are sometimes downright inaccurate. For example, Google Translate renders the menu text “Energy Taskforce” on one site into Spanish as “Energy of the Force of Work” (“Energía de la Fuerza de Tarea”), from which the real meaning if the link can’t even be guessed. A good rule of thumb for Google Translate is that any page on which you would be comfortable posting content with spelling and grammatical errors is a good candidate for using only Google Translate without human translation.

http://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/GoogleTranslate.aspx22147Content is currency5/7/2011 7:36:54 PMWe've quoted Mike Berkley's blog post previously in which he said that "content is currency --- companies can print their own, but most don't." The truth of that statement really struck me today as I was looking at the Google Analytics reports for our site --- especially because of the traffic that one fairly random blog post has been getting. Several months ago, I posted a simple html/css solution to an issue that I had in working on a customer site. I thought it was a good solution, and I wanted to share it. I had no intention of trying to attract search engine traffic, and I certainly didn't optimize the post to attract traffic.

Last month, that post got over 1700 pageviews, all from organic search results on sites like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Because I took a couple of minutes to write a quick post several months ago, our site is still getting thousands of pageviews a month from folks who otherwise might not have come. That has real value for us, even if HTML and CSS tips are not really what we are all about.

But, you may ask, is it really like being able to print your own money? I think so, but there are some caveats. Just like being able to print you own money would require a high quality printer and special inks, having people with valuable knowledge in a position to share it requires an investment in the right tools. At least as important, though, is the developing the skill and habit of producing content. Creating good Web content takes practice, and you have to know something worth sharing. Also, not every blog post will attract traffic, which is why making creating content a habit and an integral part of the culture of an organization is so important --- you never know which posts will attract traffic, so at the end of the day it is a numbers game.http://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/SYN/7355/templates/blogdetailtemplate.aspx22146Options for Multilingual Web Development5/7/2011 2:51:54 PM

Converting your Website to provide content in more than one language can be relatively simple, or it can be large project that represents a major investment for your organization. The nature of the project depends on several factors:

What you want to accomplish by adding additional languages. If are just entering a new market and want a Web presence to introduce yourself, your options and priorities are different than if you need to launch a fully functional e-commerce site to serve a large and demanding customer base.

The technology your current Website is built on. If your site is based on a content management tool (like WordPress™ , Joomla™, or SiteCore™), your process and options will be different than if your site is static HTML or uses internally developed programming to display content. Internally developed solutions often assume date and number formats, currency symbols and screen text that are not appropriate for international audiences, while the menus and links in static HTML sites are not built to display multiple languages.

How frequently the site is updated and how many target languages you have. For relatively static sites to be translated to one additional language, a different approach is appropriate than for frequently updated sites in several languages. It is critical to plan for updates, since a Web site must be maintained and updated in order to be valuable.

Whether you plan to customize site content such as images, colors and icons to be culturally appropriate for each target language and locale.

The availability of Web designers and technical resources with multilingual Web site experience and language skills. Some approaches to translating your site rely on substantial help from Web designers or IT folks and rely on them to correctly place translated text.

What are the options?

Depending on what you hope to achieve from your translation project, there are usually several options for translating your site ranging from relatively low-cost, entry-level strategies to more robust, fully globalized approaches. In general though, at each level there are better and worse choices. The table below summarizes some of these options:

http://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/Options_for_Multilingual_Web_Development.aspx22137Resources for Section 508 Compliance and Accessibility2/14/2011 7:59:35 AMI wanted to share two quick resources for testing your pages for accessibility and compliance with Section 508 of the US Federal Rehabilitation Act. If you are unfamiliar with Section 508, it mandates that the Web sites of US Federal Government Agencies remove barriers in their electronic communications that would prevent disabled people from accessing those communications. More information is available here, and the US Government's Section 508 Web site is available here.

One question you may have is whether Section 508 applies to you if you don't develop sites for the US Government. There are several reasons that building accessible sites is good practice. First, it is the right thing to do. Thought of another way, when you build accessible sites, you are choosing not to build barriers that exclude people based on their differences. We recognize that excluding people based on their differences is wrong in employment, building design, availability of services and many other fields. Web accessibility is just a logical extension of that recognition.

Section 508 is also being understood to apply to more than just Federal Agency Web sites. Many city and county governments are specifying that their Web sites must be 508 compliant, and even agencies that receive federal funds are doing so. Getting into the habit of building accessible sites is a good idea for Web developers because they may have to do so on any government funded project.

Finally, sites that work well with screen reader technology tend to also be quite readable to other devices outside the normal desktop computer world, specifically Internet search engine spiders and mobile devices. This means that by building an accessible site, you are not only doing the right thing, you will also likely benefit from better search engine results and your site will work better with mobile devices.

So, the tools that I wanted to recommend are:

AChecker: an online accessibility checker funded by the government of Ontario. The tool is available here and information about it is here.

One note about these tools. As we've been going through our site and checking for 508 compliance, we've found that the two tools frequently disagree. Cynthia Says allows for some workarounds that AChecker does not. This seems to be because Cynthia Says is targeted specifically at 508 compliance, so keep that in mind when you review the results. Also, one caution --- you may find that you need to be careful with content from external sources. One area where we still have work to do is our blog, specifically where we include markup from SlideShare. Be aware that sometimes you will need to tweak content that you get from an external service.

http://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/508_Compliance_Resources.aspx22127comScore 12/2010 Report: Welcome to the Mobile World2/7/2011 9:29:10 PMcomScore released their report
on Mobile device market share today (2/7/2011) for the 3 months
ended December 2010, and two points about the report are striking.
First, for those who have been following the Android v. iPhone battle
(which now even includes a Super
Bowl ad), it is notable that the market share of iOS devices was
basically flat, while Android devices are up 7.3% --- surpassing iPhones
for the first time to reach 28.7% of the market. At the same time, RIM
(makers of BlackBerry devices and still -- for now --- the leading
maker of smart phones) saw their share fall by 5.7%. People have been
saying for a while that RIM was in trouble, based on survey data showing
that most Blackberry users really would rather have an iPhone,
but at this point it looks like Android has been picking up the market
share lost by RIM. Of course, with the Verizon iPhone entering the
picture, things may swing decisively back
Apple's way. In any case, it looks like for now Android and iOS
devices will continue to battle for dominance while RIM loses share.

The other striking point about comScore's report was the sheer market
penetration of smart phones. More than 63 million people in the US
currently own smart phones --- up 60% from a year ago. At this rate of
smart phone growth --- and with lots of new tablet devices coming out in
2011, it's time to be thinking hard about mobile apps and/or a mobile
Web site if you have not already done so.

http://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/comScore122010.aspx22097iData work with DD agencies1/25/2011 10:02:03 AMA presentation I recently put together on our work with DD agencies:

http://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/Why_translate_your_Web_site.aspx22080Rapid Prototyping with Protoshare9/3/2009 1:36:00 PMReaders of this blog will know that I'm in favor of any tool that helps with requirements definition and project planning for Web projects. I'm convinced that it's the insufficient definition of requirements and a failure to agree on concrete expectations between clients and developers that are the primary cause of failed Web projects.

Just two weeks ago we were called in to consult with a company that had hired a Web vendor and was concerned about the project. From our discussion, it seemed that the vendor was of the "start writing code first and ask questions later" school of Web project management. and their response to several of the clients requests for details about the sit was that all would become clear once they saw the finished site, and that anything the client did not like could just be changed. Just like you would not hire a contractor who planned to build your building first and then find out how you wanted it look and function, you should not hire a Web developer who does not thoroughly research your requirements and draw up a detailed blueprint for the site.

In line with this idea, we've recently started to use a rapid Web prototyping tool for all sites that we develop. The tool is called Protoshare (www.protoshare.com), and it allows you to quickly and easily create functional prototypes of Web sites. You can iteratively prototype the site by first specifying which elements (links, text blocks, form fields) will be on each page without specifying details of colors, fonts and images. This allows you to get agreement on the broad outlines of the site. You can then add additional detail by developing CSS sytle sheets for site elements and uploading images. Finally, you can give a designer access to the prototype to develop design comps for key pages, and these comps can be uploaded directly into the site for client review.

We've found this to be an invaluable tool, and the regular enhancement schedule means that there's a good chance that the few gripes we've had with the tool will be resolved soon.http://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/Protoshare.aspx22044Determining the impact of a non-profit site4/24/2009 11:22:02 AMIn our last post we talked about the importance of focusing on the concrete goals that a Web site is supposed to deliver and of measuring the site’s success in accomplishing those goals. We also discussed the difficulty that non-profits, social service agencies and government often have in identifying concrete goals and particularly in devising ways to measure their site’s success at accomplishing goals. In this post we’ll discuss three strategies that non-profits can use to determine how successful their site is in furthering the mission of the organization.

The first and most obvious of these strategies is using a Web analytics package such as Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics) to monitor traffic to your site. As content and new features are added, you can track visits and page views on the site and determine whether more people are taking advantage of the resources on the site. It stands to reason that increasing traffic indicates that your site is becoming a more valuable resource, while decreasing traffic might indicate the opposite. Using raw visits and pageviews traffic can be problematic however, because raw numbers don’t tell you how visitors came to your site or why. If you want to truly understand how visitors are using your site, it’s important to know which areas of the site are most visited, how users are coming to the site (direct navigation, links from other sites or as a result of finding your site in an Internet search engine like Google). If you’re not getting traffic from search engines, it’s worth researching whether your site appears in search results for terms that are relevant to your site and, if not, to think about search engine optimization for the site.

If you are getting traffic from search engines, it’s a good idea to use your analytics package to understand what search terms users are using to get to your site. These details may tell a substantially different story than the raw data about site visits and pageviews. On the iData site for example, there are a couple of blog posts that have addressed somewhat arcane topics not well covered elsewhere and that rank well in search engines. These posts account for a substantial portion of the traffic to our site, but not they are not really related to our core products and services. If we relied only on overall site traffic to measure the effectiveness of our site, we would not get the complete picture.

Another often recommended strategy involves posting an online survey. Most modern Web Content Management Systems (CMS) such as iData’s Synapse Publisher include an online survey builder component, and there are a variety of free or low cost online tools such as SurveyMonkey (www.surveymonkey.com) that allow organizations to survey their sites’ visitors about how they use the site and what the organization might do better. These surveys can be a valuable tool, particularly when the organization’s understanding of how their site is used is wildly out of line with reality. In such cases, an online survey can provide an important wake-up call to those responsible for managing the site. In many cases however, a survey is of limited use. First of all, most users have been surveyed by so many sites that they will not participate, and they may resent being asked for their input. Also, online surveys may suffer from the same limitations that focus groups often do in the sense that site visitors feel compelled to offer strong opinions even when they do not feel strongly one way or another about your site, so the survey responses may include emphatic statements that exaggerate the importance of the data.

A better way to gauge how the site is used is to incorporate the site into the business processes of the organization. This can be done by encouraging site visitors who need to contact you to do so through online forms with responses emailed to someone in your organization and stored in a database so that they are available for periodic review and reporting. These forms can be developed for any area of your organizations mission where you get information from customers or clients and act on that information. Applications can range from typical contact forms that users fill out to request more information about your products or services to event registration forms that users fill out to register for events or classes. For non-profits, a key part of the organization’s mission is often providing information, which at first glance might not seem amenable to this approach. If the information is important enough to your clients, you could consider requiring users to register before providing the information. Based on our experience, we would exercise caution with this approach, however, because --- particularly in the case of non-profits --- getting critical information out is often more important than measuring who is consuming it. In most cases, using Web analytics reporting to understand how frequently your key information is accessed and downloaded is a better idea.

Two objections that many non-profits have to the idea of incorporating online forms into their business processes are:

The staff of the agency or organization would often prefer to speak with clients and potential clients who access the site in order to accurate access their needs and be sure that they are pointed in the right direction.

Wise non-profits and government agencies sometimes do not object to providing an online form but they also want to provide a phone number, email address and mailing address in order to allow site visitors to contact the organization in the way that is most convenient to the visitor.

Both of these issues can be addressed by providing offline contact methods that are published only through the Web site. These can include a site specific 800 number or phone extension, a Web-site specific PO box or mailstop and a Web-site specific email contact address. Many 800 number services (such as Ring Central --- www.ringcentral.com) offer detailed reporting on use of the 800 number, and email traffic is easy to track. Using these methods, organizations can provide site visitors a choice of the most convenient way to contact the organization while still providing an accurate picture of the impact of the Web site on the organization.

This post has discussed how non-profits, social service agencies and government can understand the impact that their Web sites have on their operations. The next post in this series will discuss what to do when you get those results --- particularly when you determine that you need to attract more traffic to your site.http://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/SYN/7340/templates/blogdetailtemplate.aspx22089Web Project Planning for Government and Non-profits9/22/2008 6:39:09 AMThis post is the first of three that will deal with Web project planning and execution for non-profits and government agencies. In this post, we discuss how to approach planning a Web project. In the next post, we’ll look at how to measure the impact of a Web project for a non-profit or government agency. The final installment will look at site promotion and search engine optimization for non-profits and government agencies.

When iData carries out Web projects with our clients, we start by reviewing their overall strategy and determining how the Web site and other online initiatives can best support this strategy. As part of this planning exercise, we identify key goals of the organization and we jointly brainstorm conversions --- specific actions that visitors to the organization’s site will take that directly relate to the identified strategic goals.

This sounds simple (and it is), but you’d be surprised how often the focus on strategic goals is lost when Web project teams dive into the detail of actually completing the project. Without a clear, prioritized list of goals and related conversions to guide project planning, project plans can easily fill with junk (design elements that the Marketing VP thinks are cool or features that the tech team wants to do because they can) while the hard, frustrating work of figuring out how to actually accomplish the vital work of the organization online goes undone.

The tendency for focus on strategic goals to be lost seems to vary directly with how involved the site is in e-commerce. For an Internet-only retailer (i.e. a pure e-commerce site), it’s pretty obvious that the focus should be on:

Getting visitors to the site, and

Converting visitors to buyers (at a profitable price).

It’s true that some online retailers focus on these fundamentals better than others, but the built in feedback mechanism of the marketplace tends to correct this --- good, usable sites get traffic, make sales, and stay in business while bad sites don’t.

For organizations where the feedback mechanism is not as direct, it is a lot harder to identify online conversions that support the key goals of the organization. I’ve been in a lot of meetings, particularly with non-profits and government agencies, where our clients have been frustrated by our attempts to reduce their project (which until the meeting have been thought of in very lofty, conceptual terms) to the fundamentals of:

A clear, concise statement of the strategic goals of the organization, and

A list of concrete things they want visitors to the organization’s site to do and how those actions support strategic goals.

These folks often object that their site is informational and that there is not really an online conversion related to what they are trying to accomplish. In other words, non-profits and government agencies are often primarily trying to inform, educate and advocate, not sell something. How are they supposed to measure and track changes in the perceptions of visitors to the site? How can they tell when someone has become more informed or educated?

These are tough and legitimate questions. It is often more comfortable for agencies and organizations to simply build a site delivers a snappy new look and feel and some cool new online do-dads rather than devote time and energy to soul-searching about the mission of the organization and how to track the Web site’s impact on that mission. But what is most comfortable and what is best for the organization are not necessarily the same. In order to do what’s best for the organization, these questions must be part of the planning process. The reality is that there are a variety of mechanisms (surveys, offline referral source tracking, creative use of contact forms) to measure the impact of a Web site, but implementing them sometimes requires a new level of discipline and adoption of new tools not only through the Web site but in the organization’s offline activities as well. The next post in this series will examine some of these tools.

http://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/Web_Project_Planning_Government_Non-profit.aspx22019Low cost usability testing9/4/2008 7:36:07 AMWhen we plan Web projects with clients, we stress (and re-stress) the importance of usability testing, especially for sites with e-commerce or significant search functionality. Many usability tests for new or redesigned sites seem to go the same way --- the first tester starts to work their way through the site and quickly uncovers some (now that they have been pointed out) blindingly obvious and major usability issues. Sometimes these are things that the development team missed, but just as often they are the result of a compromise solutions to heated disagreements between marketing, business people, designers and/or developers. On seeing the results, the Web site team often gets defensive and says "that's just one user, and besides, that guy is a doofus --- anyone else will see how it should work." Then the next tester comes in and finds the same issues. And the next, and so on.

Usability testing is a great process when the it takes place early on in the development/'testing cycle, or even during the design phase. When no testing takes place until after the site is finished and ready to be launched, it's not as fun. Major issues are often still uncovered, but now there is a lot more disappointment and blame. There are lots of uncomfortable meetings to discuss how this could have happened. For this reason, it's really a good idea to make "test early and test often" your mantra when designing or re-designing a site.

Often, there is resistance to testing. One of the main reasons cited for not testing is the cost. Fortunately, www.usertesting.com has just taken away this argument. Now, for $19 per tester (and, by the way, most problems are uncovered by a handful of testers), you can create a usability test profile, submit it, and start getting results (with video, audio and written comments) within an hour or so.

We completed a 3 user test yesterday of some of our pay per click landing pages. Guess what? We immediately heard about an obvious usability issue. We've taken the affected page down while we're re-working it. When we've finished, you can bet we'll run another test. I urge you to do the same on your site.http://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/affordable_usability_testing.aspx22001Internet connectivity speed: a challenge and an opportunity8/29/2008 10:05:44 AMAs a followup to the post about the number of Internet users in China as compared to the US, I wanted to provide a link to a recently published survey about Internet speeds in the US as compared to the rest of the world. The survey is put out by the Communication Workers of America, and it includes results of online speed tests conducted through their Website. For us, the key fact was that US speeds averaged around 2.3 megabits per second, while users in Japan average 63 mbps(yes, thats 30 times faster than the US). Other countries highlighted include South Korea (49 mbps), France (17 mbps) and Canada (7.6 mbps).

In e-commerce and Web strategy sessions with US executives trying to figure out how to address the Asian market, it's been my experience that a lot of US IT and marketing folks start from the assumption that Internet connectivity, e-commerce infrastructures and overall user sophistication in the rest of the world are all years behind where they are in the US. It's important that decision makers realize that the truth is more complicated. Yes, there are regions where connectivity is slower and e-commerce is harder, but the converse is also true -- there are, as this report shows, many countries that are far ahead of the US in Web infrastructure.

The CWA is focused on the need to upgrade US Internet access, and that is a legitimate concern. US business owners and Web decision makers should also recognize the inherent opportunity in a world full of potential consumers who are often at the other end of a really fast connection. http://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/SYN/7334/templates/blogdetailtemplate.aspx21996ROI of Tagging8/27/2008 6:01:37 PMI'm just back from vacation in Canada, and I found it interesting that the author of one of my favorite Cleveland blogs is also just getting back from a week in the same general area of Ontario. Like my family, Callahan is impressed with the commitment of our neighbors to the north to the idea of sustainable energy. We're always impressed with the everyday, just-a-part-of-normal life environmentalism we see there, including recycling bins in restaurants and limits to out-of-control growth.

Now that I'm back and catching up on podcasts, it seems that I'm hearing everywhere (for example, here) lately about the growing awareness of the business value of tagging content to make it more searchable and indexable. Tagging content is the process of associating keywords and other meta data ("tags") with content -- either when the content is created or when users read it. In the study I linked to above, researchers estimated that users at IBM save 12 seconds for every Intranet search they do because of good tagging --- which saves IBM an estimated 955 person-hours a week.

As someone with lots of experience both building data repositories that depend on tagging and using them (going back to work with Lotus notes at PMSC and E&Y in the mid 90's), I'm surprised that the figure is as low as 12 seconds per search. In my experience, good meta data, including keywords and tagging can make the difference between Intranet or Web users finding exactly the resource they need the first time and hours of fruitless searches. In my experience, it's not an exaggeration to say that good tagging is as important as good content, or, more precisely, that good tagging is enables good content to do its job. The value of tagging goes way beyond search and visually appealing Web 2.0 tricks like tag clouds. If you build tagging into the information architecture of a site before you start writing code, you can design the site to dynamically display relevant content --- things like showing related product pages when a user reads a blog post, or showing industry specific information for the industry a user selected when they registered with your site. Bottom line --- tagging is key, as is a good information architecture and content plan (developed before you start writing code).http://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/SYN/7333/templates/blogdetailtemplate.aspx21995SEO and CMS7/29/2008 5:48:57 AMWe just re-posted an article on how SEO and CMS systems relate. The article had been around for a while, but got lost in our move to the new design. Google Webmaster tools to the rescue ---we saw that Google was trying to re-scan the page but not finding it, so we re-posted.

In other news, we just put up a new product tour that walks folks through our CMS in a more step-by-step process than some of our other product literature (which tends to be big blocks of dense text). I'd be interested in any feedback.http://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/SYN/7323/templates/blogdetailtemplate.aspx21962SEO Best Practices7/18/2008 8:21:57 AMAs anyone familiar with iData’s products knows, one of the key features of our Synapse Publisher Content Management System (CMS) is the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) toolkit. The SEO Toolkit allows content authors who are subject matter experts in their field (but not SEO experts) to optimize their own content, as they create it, to be found by engines like search engines like Google® , MSN Live Search® and Yahoo!®.

Using the SEO toolkit is pretty intuitive, and we don’t get many questions about it. Even so, there are some important best practices, basics of search engine marketing, and ethics of SEO that uses of the SEO toolkit should be aware of. I won’t go into details in this post of how search engines rank pages --- that information is available in our SEO Basics article in the resources section --- but I do want to reiterate that search engine rankings are all about providing the best, most useful results to the searcher. In other words, search engines really don’t care that you or I want our sites to be ranked highly for a given keyword, they ruthlessly evaluate every site to determine which pages are most likely to be relevant to what they user searched for.

This key point --- that search engines care most about helping people find what they want -- drives the philosophy behind not only iData’s SEO Toolkit and the SEO-friendly features of our CMS, but also the whole white-hat SEO industry. In other words, to be successful long term in attracting high search engine rankings and --- more importantly --- conversions and happy users, the focus has to be 100% on helping people find something that will be useful to them. This means that your SEO efforts can’t be about trying to drive traffic to pages whether or not those pages are really relevant. Your efforts are much better spent creating lots of relevant content and organizing it in such a way that it is easy for engines to index than they are in trying to über-optimize a few pages to move up a space or two in the results.

The benefits of a user-centered approach are not just about feeling like you’re doing the right thing --- it’s less work and more effective in the long run. The reason for this has to do with keyword effectiveness and how people search. We know that a keyword will drive more traffic to your site if there are lots of people searching for it, but we also know that ranking well on a keyword is harder when there are lots of other folks also trying to rank well for the same keyword. So, a good practical approach is to find keywords that have at least some search volume, but not a lot of other people are optimizing for. These are likely to be longer keyphrases and odd word combinations. The search volume for any one of these phrases is by definition likely to be lower than the short, highly competitive keywords, but they are much easier to optimize for. Finding and optimizing for a lot of these phrases can lead to large amount of traffic.

Here’s where search behavior comes in. Web searchers, as they get more experience with search engines, increasingly search using phrases that reflect exactly what they are looking for rather than broad terms that will potentially return lots of irrelevant results. When they get results that exactly match their long, specific phrase they are very, very likely to click those results. This means that a broad rather than deep keyword strategy usually makes a lot of sense.

But who has time to research and track all those idiosyncratic phrases? The answer is that you don’t have to. If you create enough interesting content and make it easy for engines to index all of it, you will get lots of traffic on phrases that you never thought of. The screenshot below from Google Analytics for our site, www.idatatechnologies.com, illustrates this point. A couple of weeks ago, I did a slightly out of character blog post with some details of how to use CSS to style an HTML input box. Within a couple of days, we were getting lots of new traffic from Google users who had searched for a whole variety of terms related to CSS and HTML input boxes.

Note that this post was not optimized at all --- just some content that I thought might be interesting to share with others. Suddenly, it’s driving lots of traffic without me really trying for that result. The lesson here is that if you create interesting content, and publish it in a way that is easy for engines to understand, then you will get traffic. If you do some optimization around words that are important to you, then you will get more. In most situations, you really don’t have to spend lots and lots of time trying to optimize to the nth degree.

Which brings me back to doing SEO using the SEO toolkit. My advice would be to focus on creating content and doing the obvious things (title tags, human readable URL with keywords, keywords in the text, and alt tags). The screenshot below is the SEO Toolkit optimization report for a page on a content site that iData runs. As you can see, the overall optimization score of the page is 80%, but the page ranks # on Google for our main keyword, and for several variations. They message? 80% is probably good enough, and our efforts are better spent creating new content than continuing to tweak this page to try to get it to 100%.

Matt Cutts' blog recently had a post about how to reduce the volume of junk postal (snail) mail that you receive , which seemed like a cool thing for someone with a readership as large as his to post about. Of course, the real answer to junk mail is to change postal rates so that it is not economical to annoy people and damage the environment with junk mail (and perhaps this kind of change would also have the benefit of forcing some of the companies that currently rely on interruption marketing rather than innovation to step up their game). In the meantime, though, anything that we as individuals can do is important because, aside from the annoyance, the environmental cost of junk mail is quite high.

Matt's suggestions got me thinking about steps iData can take to be greener, and one obvious step came to mind, namely to research and advocate green Web hosting companies. People often don't think much about the power required to run Web servers (and more importantly to power the air conditioning units that data centers run), but it is significant. Since most greenhouse gas emissions are from power plants, reducing energy consumption in any way we can is really important. So, over the next several months, we'll be looking into Green Web hosting, and we'll let you know what we find. In the meantime, here are some resources:

By the way, thinking about green Web hosting got me thinking about whether people really care about the environmental impact of the choices they make in their daily lives, which gave me an excuse to use Google Trends to do a little research about what people are searching for. If you haven't played with Google Trends, you should. It is a service that lets you see among other things the relative frequency of different search terms (i.e. Yankees versus Red Sox). The most interesting result I saw in comparing various environment-related terms was the relative frequency of searches for "electric car" versus "cheap gas" (see the screenshot below). It seems we hear from the media all the time how ordinary people are not concerned about conservation, they just want cheap gas so we should focus on more drilling (even though drilling to solve our current energy problems is, according to the US Energy Information Administration, not a realistic option ).

But guess what --- people search more frequently for information about electric cars (red line) than they do for cheap gas (blue line), which suggests to me that maybe your average Web surfer is a lot smarter than many in the media and in politics, who often suggest short sighted and unrealistic solutions when what people want is real, thoughtful leadership. This impression is further borne out by the lower graph, displaying the volume of news stories about both terms. The conventional wisdom is that news stories drive search volume, but in this case you see that the reverse may be true --- the most recent spike in the volume of stories about electric cars has come after a sustained rise in the number searches, suggesting that the media is belatedly catching on to people's interest in electric cars.

http://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/green_Web_hosting_and_electric_cars.aspx21940China Leads in Internet Users, and the US Dollar is Down7/1/2008 12:00:00 AMRaya Wasser of TopTrans just forwarded me a link to a New York Times article reporting that China has now passed the US in terms the number of its citizens who are online.

This is a particularly interesting development when considered in conjunction with what's going on in the US economy --- a weak dollar contributed to an 11% rise in US exports in the second quarter of 2008.

What does this mean to US firms? Well, there are now more potential customers online in China, and goods made in the US are suddenly more affordable. This is a great time for firms that have not considered exporting through e-commerce to do so (especially considering that the US government is willing to help), and a great time for those whose Web sites are in English only to consider translating their sites as well.

This post will explore one way that we use Google’s Webmaster Tools to optimize our site. In case you're not familiar with Google Webmaster Tools, they are found in the Webmasters area of the Google site (
here
), and you can get a quick introduction from our article about the predecessor application, called
Google Webmaster Console.

One of the most useful areas of Webmaster Tools is the overview screen. The overview provides a summary of any issues that Google sees with your site.

For example, let’s say that you decide (like iData recently did) to update your site and re-organize the content, but you don’t want to lose search engine rank accumulated by the old pages/URLs. As those who’ve been through the process know, in this situation you want to use
301 redirects
to let search engines and site visitors know about the change. For our update, we implemented 301 redirects for almost all of our old site pages (we thought) using the URL redirect functionality built into our Synapse Publisher CMS.

Soon after the move, when we looked at the overview, we started seeing pages from the old site showing up as not found. Clicking the not found error brings up the Web Crawl report with details of the URLs. This report is great, because it gave us a handy list of pages we’d missed creating URLs for.

To fix these pages, I logged into Synapse, went to the URL Redirects screen and added the missing links.

I then went back to the Web Crawl report and clicked the missing URLs in order to make sure that they were fixed. Clicking the links now brings up the redirected page of new content, which is exactly what we want.

Visiting the Overview report and looking at the Web Crawl report are important not only when you have gone through a major redesign. It’s a good idea to use these tools on an ongoing basis to make sure that you have not deleted or moved content that Google has indexed.http://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/Google_Webmaster_Tools_301_Redirect.aspx21933Anti-social media6/19/2008 11:46:44 AMI saw a post on TechCrunch this morning about problems with the Google App Engine. The Google App Engine is an application development / hosting platform offered by Google for free (up to a pretty generous bandwidth / storage limit). Like many other free offerings from Google, I love the philosophy behind Google Apps --- it is democratizing (meritocratising?) while at the same time offering a practical solution to real problems faced especially by small businesses. In theory, a small group of smart people can develop the next killer app, offer it as a Web service and start a business, all without buying a single server. A host of other companies, especially in the social media space, seem to offer similar benefits by providing a Web based service along with an API to let developers create applications around the service.

However, as the problems with the Google App Engine (and some other services such as Twitter and Flickr) make clear, there is a definite risk to developing applications that reside outside the walls of the enterprise. I'm reminded of a 2005 article called Six Things you Should Know About Bubble 2.0 (Andrew Orlowski's ironic name for the Web 2.0 hype). In point #6, Orlowski argues that most of the folks behind Web 2.0, social media and cloud computing applications in general are not up to the task of building reliable, scalable applications. He goes so far as to suggest that the software engineers involved are not serious and not knowledgeable about system-level programming and robust, fault-tolerant design. This seems to be me to be going a little far, in addition to being a needlessly ad hominem argument.

In searching for Orlowski's article in order to link to it, I stumbled across another whole set of sites and blog commentary that point out an entirely different set of issues with social media. One of the key critiques of social media made by sites like AntiSocialMedia.net is that the democratic, participatory nature of most social media sites, along with their underlying assumption that most people have an honest contribution to make is highly vulnerable to small numbers of people who are highly motivated to be dishonest. The focus of the pages that I read on AntiSocialMedia.net was on stock manipulation by fake comments left on financial site message boards, but I also saw links to content about fake Amazon.com reviews and other similar for-profit hoaxes.

All in all, I think it would be a mistake to assume because of outages and scalability issues that the idea of cloud computing is invalid. Similarly, I think it's clear that software as a service (and applications built on social media APIs specifically) are here to stay. The key will be for organizations to make smart decisions about how they make use of these opportunities. Should a Fortune 500 company build mission critical applications on the Google App Engine? No, not given the security and uptime concerns that those companies have. Does it make sense for small or medium sized firms to build non-mission critical applications or even mission-critical but non-uptime critical applications that make use of free APIs and cloud resources? Sure, as long as they have thought through what they will do when those services and resources are not available. In many ways, this is exactly like decisions that we've all been making for a long time about Web and email hosting --- do I do it myself, or outsource? If I outsource, what are my contingency plans? As long as those are in place, expectations are set reasonably, and there is a plan to immediately communicate with users about outages, I would not hesitate to use the free services that are out there.

http://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/Google_app_engine_problems.aspx21924Conversation Marketing6/4/2008 7:48:33 AMThis morning as I was driving to work, I listened to John Jantsch's conversation with Paul Gillin on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. They were discussing Paul's book, The New Influencers. A couple of key points that Paul made really struck me.

First is the distinction between "interruption marketing" versus "conversation marketing." Interruption marketing seeks to interrupt people from something that they are doing (driving down the highway, watching TV, listening to music) to get them to pay attention to an essentially unrelated marketing message. Conversation marketing seeks to engage people by providing them targeted information about something that they are interested in as part of an activity that they choose to do. Paul argued that conversation marketing can work by drawing in people who set trends (influencers) and getting them to talk about products or services, but the thing that really struck me about the whole idea of conversation marketing was the notion that for this to work, there must truly be a conversation. This means that the person doing the marketing must draw people (ideally influencers) into a real conversation very early on in the lifecycle of the product or service and really listen to and value their feedback by building that feedback into the product or service. This is a leap that traditional marketers are often afraid to make, but it can be hugely effective and it is much more human and genuine than seeking to interrupt as many people as possible.

The second point that really struck a chord with me was Paul's suggestion to focus on strategy rather than particular technologies. This struck me because he used an analogy to building a house that was very similar to one we use with clients. Paul said lots of companies pick a social media technology like blogging and then try to figure out what to do with it. In building a house, though, no one buys a sack of concrete, then says "what are we going to do with this concrete?" They key is to focus on what you want to get done, then choose appropriate technology. Similarly, we sometimes meet with clients who say "we need a new Website" without really knowing what they want or why they need it. We like to say to those clients "Look, you would not say to a building contractor just that you need a new building. You would say you need more office space, or a new restaurant location or a factory --- something that you needed to further your business goals. Let's start by figuring out what you want to get done as a business, and then figure out what needs to be built." http://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/conversation_marketing.aspx21892Content as currency6/2/2008 4:36:28 PMWe've all heard that on the Web --- especially with respect to Search Engine Optimization and attracting traffic --- "content is king." Janet Lee Johnson, blogging on the Content Management Connection site passed along a great quotation from Mike Berkley's SplashCast blog, which I in turn would like to share here:

Content is the currency used to acquire audience. Companies can print their own. Most don’t.

This was particulary striking to me because I've been in meetings over the last couple of days with two organizations that are just getting started with substantial Web projects. Both are going to be content centered sites (i.e. informational as opposed to commerce), and both have a lot to offer their constituencies in terms of information that has the potential to make a positive impact on the lives of real people in their communities.

To differing degrees, folks from both organizations are excited about the contribution that their sites can make, but at the same time leery of the commitment in terms of time and energy that will be required to create content. I'm quite sympathetic to this concern, but I do think it's critical for organizations that would like their Web sites to be valuable resources to find the time to make creating content a regular part of their day-to-day jobs.

I thought one participant in a strategy planning session summed up what must be done almost as well as the quotation above. Within the space of a couple of minutes, the conversation had turned from from how all concerned want the Website to be a valuable resource to, again, concerns about committing to creating content. "If we want the Web site to be a valuable resource," she responded, "we have to commit to creating a something of value."

This is exactly the point --- in most cases creating a valuable Web resource is not the job of the programmers and designers involved. Those specialists can only lay the foundation. Actually building the value of the site comes down to people from the organization rolling up their sleeves and doing the work of sharing their knowledge and expertise --- the things that make their organization unique and valuable --- by creating great content. Of course, good tools for creating online content help, but they can't do the work for you.

http://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/content_as_currency.aspx21849CSS input fields with rounded corners6/2/2008 4:34:19 PMSo it's not my intention to post frequently about technology nuts and bolts, but I thought this was fun. We're working on a client site for which the client wants the site search input box to be rounded and have a colored background like this:

This site uses our Synapse Publisher CMS, which includes a built in site search control. This control lets you set CSS classes for the input box and text or image button, but a quick internet search for using CSS to create an input box with rounded corners did not reveal any CSS solutions which did not require the input field markup to be changed --- everyone wanted to either position images next to the input control or put it in a DIV and set the background of the DIV.

Fortunately, a CSS solution that does not require any markup other than setting the CSS class of the input control and creating an image for the input control background was pretty straightforward. Here's the class:

The end result is the shot above. By the way --- one note to any MAC using designers who read this --- the contrast between search box and background renders renders much lower on the PC than on the MAC. These colors will have to change before the site goes live because the search box fades into the background on the PC.http://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/SYN/7257/templates/blogdetailtemplate.aspx21848FTC updates CAN-SPAM rules5/20/2008 5:07:43 PMOn May 12, the US Federal Trade Commission approved updates to four areas of the Federal legislation known as CAN SPAM. Two minor updates had to do with the requirement for commercial mail to include a physical address (the new rules say that a valid post office box is OK) and with the definition of a person (yes, corporations count).

The two areas that may have a significant impact are:

New requirement about opting out of email lists. The intent of the updates is to ensure that opting out is easy for mail recipients. There are some obvious conditions that should not impact legitimate senders (the recipient cannot be asked to pay a fee, for example), but there is also a new requirement that opting out must be "one click", which means in effect that your site cannot ask users to log in or provide any information other than their email address to log out. If your user profiles for email also include other information (e.g. e-commerce order history, for example) and you require users to log in to access all of their data, then the updates could be a bit of a headache for you.

Updates to the definition of the sender of commercial mail. Under the updated rules, the sender of a message is the person who controls the content of the message. This means that if your organization uses a third party service to send mails, it is the single person whose name appears in the "from" field of the email that is responsible for providing opt-out functionality, not the vendor. Senders, even when they do not use a third party service, also sometimes have separate domains for the "from" address of their emails and the "sender" (technically the "mail-from" header). This was previously legal (although a bad idea for deliverability), but it is no longer.

Now would probably be a good time to review your organization's CAN SPAM compliance and make any necessary updates.http://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/FTC updates_CAN_SPAM_rules.aspx21794Check out the Touchwall5/20/2008 7:50:23 AMTechCrunch has an iteresting post about the Touchwall, an inexpensive (hundreds of US dollars) wall-sized smartboard constructed from existing software, a projector and a big sheet of plexiglass.http://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/SYN/7250/templates/blogdetailtemplate.aspx21783Google adsense revenues flat?5/19/2008 10:21:08 AMBlackHat SEO has an interesting (if slightly odd) post about Google losing $85 billion in market capitlization which attributes an almost $300 drop in the price of Google shares to a simple decision to change how adsense clickthroughs work. http://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/googleAdSenseRevenuesFlat.aspx21782Web Globalization - Just for Large Companies?2/1/2008 12:00:00 AMI'm attending the IQPC Web Site Globalization conference later this month in San Diego, so I've been reading up on the current state of the Web globalization business.

After years of corporate skepticism about creating multiple language sites, the tide seems to be turning --- large companies generally now recognize that having a Web site available in the languages of their target market has a positive ROI. Large technology companies like Dell, HP, IBM, Symantec, HP and Microsoft have extremely multilingual sites--- Dell's site has more than 80 languages. When you take into account not only the expense of translation but also the multiplier effect of any change that requires per-language intervention, you can begin to appreciate the truly massive commitment that a site in more than 80 languages represents.

Despite this trend, if you are an IT decision maker at a US company not among the Fortune 500, you are probably still wondering whether the expense of translating into even a handful of additional languages makes sense. The answer of course, depends on the nature of your market, or more accurately your market potential.

The first question to ask yourself is if you make or sell a product or service that either can be exported or might be purchased by a non-native English speaker --- like one of the 43.5 million native Spanish speakers in the US. If so, then a multilingual site might make sense for you, but that is only the first half of the equation in evaluating your market potential among non-English speakers. The next question is: how prepared are you to support purchasers abroad or non-English-speaking customers in the US? Having the capacity to support these customers is important in at least two ways.

First, you must realize that getting a multilingual Web site does just mean that you send out your HTML files for translation, put whatever you get from the translator up on the Web and wait for orders. Folks who have seen collections of signs posted abroad in tortured English (e.g. the drycleaner's sign "drop your pants here for best results") will understand why not. These seem funny, but the reality is that without the ability to have native speakers review content, you could have no idea if the translated Web pages you receive back from your translation provider are any better. For this reason, some independent third party review of translations is essential. This requires the help of in-country staff, partners, distributors or customers.

Second, if you are going to ask for business from non-English speakers, you must have the capacity to conduct business on their language -- to answer Web contact form submissions, to deal with warrantee or support issues and sometimes even just to complete the sale.

Does this mean that, if you cannot support full localization of your site with expert in-country review of each word, and native-speaker customer service staff you should not do any localization? The conventional wisdom would say "no." Most language professionals would say that trying to develop a site in a language that you cannot really support will just raise expectations. This may be true, if you go about the process without explicitly setting user expectations. However, if you do work to set user expectations appropriately --- i.e. make clear in a positive way that you are providing some localized content as a convenience, but your abilities in this area are limited --- then not only will users probably appreciate it (some localized content is better than none), but you may also reap big search engine optimization benefits.

As explained by an excellent article in the January issue of Global By Design, non-native English speakers often search first in their native language --- even for industry jargon that has a common, international English term. This is presumably on the off chance that a countryman has published something in their language on the topic. The point is that these are often high-value keywords with no competing sites, so you can dramatically increase traffic with even limited strategic localization.http://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/SYN/7251/templates/blogdetailtemplate.aspx21784Web projects as political footballs1/1/2008 12:00:00 AMI’ve been reading The E-myth Revisited by Michael Gerber this week, which has prompted me to think about what we do well and how to systematize our process and communicate about it more effectively.

One of the key things that I've come to --- I think it helps that we work in several different areas at the same time. We are active in SEO, but our main focus is content management. Since our largest client’s Web site offers content in more than 20 languages, we are forced to think about both SEO and content management in multiple languages. Since in addition to Web development and consulting we are also a software developer, we’re always thinking about creating things that are maintainable down the road and can be easily extendable.

I had occasion last year to work with folks from a major e-commerce search and site navigation vendor. They make amazingly powerful solutions, and have a client list that is literally the who’s who of major e-commerce players. The one challenge that I found in talking with some of their folks on a client project was that they did not seem to have good answers to some of my questions about how to create a search engine friendly site that uses their navigation and search features. I got a lot of suggestions to “have the front end take care of that.” Fair enough, and as I’ve said their clients are enormously successful using their tools, but I was very concerned about having so many issues coded around in the front end --- I was concerned that we’d end up with a brittle and un-maintainable solution . Similarly, when we had conversations about how to implement a highly multilingual solution, we were back to suggestions to code around limitations in the front end.

Lots of similar stories come to mind of working with designers who believe that pretty pictures really are the most important thing, although they will give lip service to things like SEO and usability, which to them are fundamentally distractions from the pretty pictures. The point is, though, to find out how to help folks create sites that work --- for the customers, not designed by committee, least common denominator, compromises, which seems all too often to happen.

We have of, course created design guidelines and we’ve mapped out at least a first cut at an ROI-driven Web planning process, but guidelines and process maps don’t address the fundamentally political issues at the heart of the design-by-compromise process that often seems to take place.

One way that we have thought of talking about what we do with clients is to ask them “what is a Website?” Lots of people will answer that it is a tool for getting information about an organization, or sometime for buying the organization’s goods and services. Some will say it is a collection of image and text files on a Web server. We’d typically try to get them to thing of some of the other things that a Website is:

- Your first introduction to many of your new customers, employees and partners,- The most powerful customer service tool you could have,- Potentially the hardest working sales person you could have,- At worst, a potential source of liability and or embarrassment

To this list we should add “a political football.” What we’re working on now is a process to address the political side of Web development and redesignshttp://www.idatatechnologies.com/en-US/SYN/7252/templates/blogdetailtemplate.aspx21785